Deanna England

Deanna England is currently the Graduate Studies Officer at The University of Winnipeg in Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada. She graduated with an honours degree in Psychology in 1998 and worked in marketing and events for seven years before returning to Academia. She has done absolutely nothing with her honours thesis research on “Religiosity and Neuroticism’s Effects on Death Anxiety” but does enjoy quoting Freud whenever she can. She recently began her Master’s degree in Cultural Studies exploring women’s engagement with erotic writing and online communities.

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I Will Now Stop Resenting the B+ I Earned Last Fall Quite So Much...
I was offered a position as a marking assistant in the Women and Gender Studies department, and offer that made my day/week/month. I felt like I had finally “arrived” to be tapped on the shoulder like that. In my undergrad years I always envied the students who were asked to RA or TA for faculty members. They always seemed somehow smarter, or more together than I was. So to be asked now brought me back to my twenty-one year old self, validating my worthiness as a student. Silly, I know.

I recently attended a seminar hosted by Jack Zipes on fairy tale film research. It was an informal meeting where he showed us several obscure film clips on fairy tale interpretations and invited us to give our responses. It was a wonderful event offering interesting perspectives on familiar tales such as Cinderella and Blue Beard, and new insights into Red Riding Hood that I would love to work into my ongoing SlutWalk narrative.

Often in class or informal discussions my classmates and I would gleefully make up words, justifying the practice by saying “we’re academics – we’re just creating new vocabulary to expand the discourse.” Of course this is all just rationalizing the bastardization of the English language, but we amused ourselves with it nonetheless. In some ways, it was a kind of dreaming ahead – one day we would be “real” academics. Our made up words would subsequently be cited and we would go down in the annals of scholarship as being the source for an absolutely integral concept or phrase. It could happen right?

I have now completed the last actual class of my degree. I have one Special Studies course to complete this Spring (Jane Austen and Adaptation, woo!) and then I graduate. And while I’m not yet breathing a sigh of relief and soliciting congratulations, I feel that I’m now in a position to reflect back over the course of this program a little, particularly at how I’ve experienced the dual-role I currently straddle.

I really like Facebook Scrabble – I spend far too much time on there, with only a vague justification that it “increases my vocabulary.” Over my Christmas holidays, I spent the vast majority of my 10 days off napping and finding new Scrabble opponents. All my grandiose plans of completing my Special Studies proposal (Sex and Jane Austen – woo!), preparing my section of the introduction for the book I’m working on, editing chapters for said book, submitting papers to journals and/or conferences – yeah, none of that happened. Well, the barest minimum of it happened anyhow.

When I first began working at the University, I was absolutely terrified of making an idiot of myself. I had graduated ten years earlier with an honours degree in Psychology, and had done very little of academic note since then. And while I still don’t relish the idea of broadcasting my ignorance when it happens to come up, I have realized that faculty and administration do understand that everyone comes from diverse educational backgrounds: one person’s expertise in bats does not make another’s knowledge of tree rings any less significant or noteworthy.

I got an A+ in Porn. That fact still amuses and delights me, and in certain circles I am sure to find some semi-awkward way to bring it up in conversation. And while I would never claim to be an aficionado of pornographic film or erotic text, I did spend a great deal of time this past Winter in a Special Studies course exploring pornography, erotica and romance, focusing on the production of erotic writing by women.

According to the Chair of my program – my application had to be “pretty dismal” in order to be rejected. She was being flippant of course; she had carefully reviewed my transcript and suggested a couple of courses to take to increase my chances of acceptance. However her point really was to warn me that being a part-time student meant that I wouldn’t be offered funding, implying that there wasn’t much reason to reject my application, assuming that I met all eligibility requirements.

Occasionally, like most of us I’m sure, I rail at the seeming impossibility of the path I’ve chosen. I struggle with maintaining my professional, personal, and academic obligations and to be honest, I’m not sure how successfully I manage it. Some days (like today) as I stare at a blank word document, fighting the rising sense of panic at the fact that I have a paper due in less than a week, I wonder if it’s really worth it. I was happily immersed in a job that I loved. I had a social life. My condo was clean.